Some Reflections on the Novels of Marilynne Robinson

My two years in the USA went in fairly deep. I travelled as much as I could, as often as possible by train, and so gained a sense of the vast beauty and terrifying loneliness of North America. The trains plunge through the raw, gut parts of the cities, as well as through the remotest deserts and canyons, and take you much closer to the real place than the modern Interstate highways.

 

I also felt the justified sourness and resentment caused by the colour bar (still very much in existence, though not usually acknowledged -  and enforced by custom rather than by law). Unlike white Americans, I felt fairly free to cross it, as a non-combatant in the unending combat over slavery and segregation and what followed, for which there is no simple name. I was more than once made very welcome in Black churches, an extremely moving experience of what can only be called grace. I am not sure a black Englishman, equally neutral, would have met with the same generosity in White churches.

 

As a churchgoing Christian I was also more at ease with my American neighbours than many English temporary residents, whose casual Godlessness amazes Americans of almost every class. I learned that religion was important to an understanding of the country.

 

But I only began to get to grips with its complexities. My own Anglican tradition, for instance, is just one among many strands, and generally identified with wealth and –these days –liberalism, though not necessarily so in the South.

 

Religion is mainly and plainly Calvinist Protestantism, stripped clean of the lingering Catholic and ritualist remnants which cling to Anglicanism as ivy does to an ancient tree.

 

It suits these.  the most American of Americans, the plain, dutiful multitudes who inhabit the ‘Flyover States’ (because everyone else just flies over them), the overpoweringly spacious prairie regions which open up a few hours West of Chicago, on the far side of the Mississippi.

 

It’s not surprising. The land they inhabit has a fierce, biblical character missing from our damp well-watered hill, mild, misty skies, soft winds and sheltered, temperate valleys.

 

On the great plains, man is obviously a trespasser in a region not meant for settlement. Go far enough and you will find genuine homicidal deserts and real, jagged mountains you could die while trying to cross.

 

I’ve never forgotten the summer evening I rolled across the Great Father of Waters on a tremendous double-decker train bound for New Mexico. It took about 20 minutes to trundle across the river, and dusk had fallen thickly by the time we reached the other side. The next day, I watched from the dining car as antelope fled from the train.  At this point, as if to emphasize you’re somewhere else, radio station call signs begin with ‘K’ instead of the ‘W’ you get in the Europeanized east. 

 

 

 

And here, or somewhere near it, is the world of Marilynne Robinson, the much-garlanded American novelist much beloved of liberals and disliked (to my knowledge) by some religious conservatives.  Her world is the cornfields of Iowa, though she comes from much further west, Sandpoint, a small town which now possesses the only passenger rail station in the whole of Idaho, and which I must have passed through, all unknowing, on my way from Portland to Chicago in the middle of a June night many years ago.

 

 

 

You will either greatly like or be utterly unmoved by her poetic, almost Biblical style of writing, which flows like clear cold water and is full of quiet power while remaining oddly conversational.

 

Her memory is plainly full of Shakespeare and the Authorised (King James)Version of the Bible, from which I suspect she can quote at will.  Her first novel ‘Housekeeping’ , a (to my mind) extremely strange account of the wildly eccentric upbringing of two very different sisters by a succession or more or less unhinged female relatives in a collapsing and chaotic old house, may possibly be autobiographical. If it is, then it is yet more proof that writers of fiction probably need to have unconventional childhoods. A happy, secure, contented normality would atrophy the muscles of the imagination

 

It is the next three (‘Gilead’, ‘Home’ and ‘Lila’) which first attracted my attention. They are all different aspects of the same story, of the same people in the same small Iowa town, each told by different characters.  I have seen other explanations of them, but to me they are an unending struggle to work out why things happen as they do, and how to be good when all, or most hope is gone.

 

The three lives are each full of desperate sadness. The old and dying Calvinist pastor’s young wife and baby die, leaving him bereft for years. His own childhood had been haunted by his parents’ grief at the death of almost all his siblings in a diphtheria epidemic.

 

‘And then he began to tell her about the brother and sisters who had died before he was born, and how his mother said once that the stairs were scuffed by the children’s shoes because she never could keep them from running in the house. And when she found a scrawl in a book she said ‘”One of the children must have done it.” There was a kind of fondness and sadness in her voice that he heard only when she mentioned them’. And if that doesn’t grasp at your heart, then these books probably won’t do anything for you.

 

But the person to whom he is telling this story, Lila,  has a far worse tale of her own, which is slowly revealed to us and which concerns her years on the very rough edges of American life where civilisation brushes up against starvation and feral cruelty. She has heard people howling for loss and grief, and done it herself, much worse than the mild tears and cries of the settled folk, and sometimes wonders if she, by certain acts, could cause her benefactors in the town of Gilead to discover the same sort of grief in themselves, and to cry out in voices of pain, voices they do not yet know that they possess. 

 

There is another character, Jack, the scapegrace son of the town’s other Protestant minister. As far as I can see, nothing anyone could have said or done would have made this man’s life contented or normal. The question of whether his many bad deeds are his own fault is asked but not truly answered. The question of whether he can be or will be forgiven is not answered either. There is not much balm in this Gilead.

 

From his childhood he has had some part of himself missing, the part that wishes to please and conform, and in its place is a wild desire to taunt to hurt and upset, combined (as it often is) with a winning charm. 

 

Among Calvinists, with their terrifying belief in predestination, by which some are unalterably damned, such a person might feel that he was cut off from all hope from a very early age. This belief is regularly used to torture Calvinists. I am told that Marilynne Robinson retorts, when asked about this,  that most modern secular beliefs are even more determinist, especially those which attribute our behaviour to unalterable DNA patterns.

 

It is not just Jack who is stalked by this unease. Lila, who owes her life (literally)  to the selfless kindness of unbaptized and rackety people, is perplexed by the possibility that, even despite their sacrificial acts of goodness to her, they cannot possibly be saved.

 

And yet this young man Jack has received a pretty large portion of grace, undeserved, unearned favour. For in his sordid and often wicked life he has come into contact with an African-American family  (I won’t say how) and with an African-American Pastor so appalled by the treatment of those with his skin colour that he has concluded that white people must, despite their protestations of faith, be atheists.

 

I have to say that revelation in the book tolled like a great bell, suddenly swung in a high tower, uncomfortably close,  when I wasn’t expecting any sound at all.

 

All these things happen in the presence of recent, fierce history – including living memories of a severe and violent grandfather who believed he had seen Jesus Christ in chains, his wrists galled with the iron, and so set out with a gun in his hand to fight for Abolition of Slavery in the Civil War, returning with one eye and a series of frightening eccentricities. But in those times Iowa had been an Abolitionist stronghold.

 

 

And they happen in a country of mystical sunsets, abandoned shacks, storms that could have come out of the Book of Job, snowstorms that can take your life within a few feet of your own front door, and wild rivers in which one can be baptized. I said Marilynne Robinson’s prose was like clear, cold water and so it is – and sometimes it is about water too - you are never far from its cleansing, chilly power, or from the mysterious rush of the wind, sounding like the ocean in regions impossibly far from any sea. 

 

Many things happen. Much is explained. Much is hinted at, sometimes so cautiously that I often almost missed some huge event, referred to in such a brief phrase that you could easily have misunderstood its importance.

 

But I think it is full of the belief that eternity is all around us, that God is real and that our unending discovery of Him and His will must always be our main purpose . One passage reminded me of a favourite snatch from one of G.K.Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, in which the little priest warns that we often completely misunderstand the nature of what we experience, like people looking the wrong side of the tapestry, but convincing ourselves that it is the right side.

 

Pastor Ames ponders in a sermon:

 

‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed’.’

 

 

And:

 

‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing.

   

 

‘Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in his eternal, freely given constancy.’

 

And earlier: ‘My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do everything we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

 

‘I have struggled with this my whole life’

 

 

People say they love these books, and I can see why.  Quite how they can do so without discerning within them a serious, deep, patient but modest defence of the Christian proposition, I do not know.